Recently Virgin Galactic suffered a horrible setback: their SS2 “spaceplane” crashed, killing one and injuring another. My deepest sympathies go out to their families; this blog post is not meant to disrespect these brave men in any way.
My beef is with the graphic-design bozos at Virgin Galactic, who give us this laughable graphic:
It looks nifty, sure. But the science (as represented by this travesty) is weak to say the least. In fact, I’ll say more: the science in this graphic is laughable.
First of all, notice how there’s a dotted line that says “edge of space”. It’s like the Mason-Dixon line: on one side, you can buy sweet tea, on the other side, you can’t. It’s nice how they colored space “black” and colored “not space” blue. Thanks. That clarifies things.
In point of fact, of course, there is no “Edge of space”. The atmosphere decreases gradually as you move away from the Earth. Where do you draw the line? Should it be the upper limit of human survivability, around 10,000 meters, or maybe the upper limit of commercial airline flights, at around 18,000 meters? The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) puts “space” at 100,000 meters, but that is arbitrary. Nothing special “happens” at that height.
Secondly, notice how the graphic says that there’s “zero gravity” at that height. Sigh. Don’t they go over this in 6th grade?
There’s plenty of gravity in space; at least, where satellites orbit. (I discuss this at greater length in an earlier post.) At 100,000 meters, the acceleration due to gravity g has the value of 9.5 m/s2, compared to 9.8 m/s2 at sea level. That’s not “zero gravity.”
I’m sure what they meant was that the plane is traveling in some parabolic arc, and at that the top of that arc the plane is in free fall, so (momentarily) people on the plane experience the absence of any normal force, otherwise known as a state of “apparent weightlessness”. Oh, who am I kidding. They didn’t mean that…they meant what they said, and what they said was nonsense.
I’m not pointing any fingers for the SS2 disaster, and anyway, the NTSB will figure it out eventually. Until then, don’t rely on the Virgin Galactic design team to know anything beyond 6th grade physics.
Many Worlds Theory 